ReeHart – Blogging from the Heart

No matter what services your dental practice offers, you want to be easily found on the Internet. Having a creatively designed website alone may not be enough to support a regular flow of traffic, which will not generate many new patients for your practice. Whether you specialize in cosmetic dentistry, complete family dentistry or offer only services for kids, those who are looking for a good dentist need to see your information first.

Your website may give you a new patient here or there but this is not getting the most out of your site. If you fail to choose a good marketing plan, your website will end up being only a way for existing patients to get your phone number or address. You have a well-designed website. Why not maximize the number of times it will be seen? If you do not, it will stagnate on the Internet and be overlooked by prospective patients who, instead see another competitively marketed dental website.

I’ve been spending a lot of time researching Internet dental marketing and different online tactics and strategies which dentists have used successfully and which they have used with not such good results. And it’s the tactics that both work and the tactics that don’t work that I want to share with you so you don’t make the same mistakes that others have made, and then you could build on the work that other dentists have done to improve their online marketing program.

Some marketing tools, Yahoo! Answers for example, are good ways to generate a flow of traffic to your website. On the other hand, maintaining this type of advertizing takes a monstrous amount of your time, which is time taken away from your practice and your family. To implement this type of marketing, you will need to sign up to use the forum, which in this case is a place where people can go and post questions about dental services. You will also need to sign up to get an email alert when one of these questions is asked. This answer will need to be given fairly quickly. After that, the person whose question you have then answered might come into your practice for their dental needs. This marketing tool is not the most time saving way to advertize online because you will have to wait for a question to come in, take the time to answer it thoughtfully and then hope you’ve earned a new patient.

One more method that has yielded some success to dentists is to start a dental blog. There are several drawbacks to marketing using a blog, however. The first drawback is the fact that each time you post to your blog it is a time consuming process. Even after you post, you need to continue posting constantly to keep new information flowing about the services you have performed and offer. Along with all that time spent writing; there is the problem of anonymity because you will not want to post your name or pertinent contact information on your blog. Some dentists choose to use a less time consuming method of advertising such as Google Adwords, however, this is extremely costly and you will still have to pick your own keywords and keyphrases, such as family dental, or teeth whitening, so that search engines have a way to find your practice.

A main objective in marketing your dental practice online is finding low cost advertizing. Choosing an expensive marketing tool that works well to bring in more patients is only successful in getting people in the door; because what you earn from providing services to them will be gobbled up by your large advertizing bill. This type of advertizing is called “click-through” advertizing. Prospective patients can click on your ad when they find it on the Internet. A drawback here is that anyone can click on your ad and this costs money every time. Say, for instance, a competing dental practice wants to run up your advertizing bill so they click on your ad repeatedly during a month. Sometime during the month a person who is looking for the dental services you offer clicks on your ad and comes in for an office visit. Your advertizing bill for that time period could be astronomical but only resulting in one new patient. This is clearly not a cost effective advertizing method because even though someone may click your ad while they are looking for a dental practice, it does not always mean they will actually come to your office.

There is a better time- and cost-effective way for a dental practice to advertize online. Some dentists have started asking the patients that are happy with their experiences to go to a third-party site like Yelp to post a review of their practice. This is extremely effective in getting good information in circulation on the Internet because when someone searches for a dentist they find favorable reviews about the dentist’s practice. This works well to bring in new patients. Although these dentists are getting good reviews posted from their patients, there is the problem that not every patient is pleased with their experience with the dentist even though the dentist thinks they are. This patient then will go to the site and post a questionable, or a negative review that is damaging to the dentist’s online reputation and does exactly the opposite of what the advertizing was supposed to do. Instead of finding purely favorable reviews during a search, a potential new patient could find something negative, and this is clearly not the goal.

Search engines index whatever information is available, be it a stellar review or a really bad one. The obvious best scenario here would be to have only favorable information available for the search engines to pull from. If a search turns up information on a third party site like Citisearch the dentist has no control over what reviews have been posted there, nor does that dentist have a way of collecting the reviews himself. This makes the dentist powerless to control his online reputation.

The best way to address this is to have your own review site with your own brand, your own logo, with your own web address. With such a site, you can have patients go there and write reviews. You can collect reviews from virtually every patient who walks through your doors, whether it’s positive or negative. In a matter of no time, you’ll be able to collect more than 20 to 30 reviews, and the best thing about having your own review site is you control what gets published onto the Internet and pushed out to search engines like Google and Yahoo! That means that you will have the most favorable reviews in your community because you have complete control over what you publish online. What this ultimately translates into is a highly leveraged way to do Internet marketing which requires hardly any of your time and is extraordinarily cost effective. Essentially, what you’re doing is having your happy patients do all the work of typing in content for the promotion of your practice, and with one simple click of a button, you decide what gets pushed out on the Internet.

Comments are closed.